XMLDevCon2000 Showfloor highlights

The show floor at XMLDevCon
2000 was focused on improving existing technology, rather than creating
entirely new concepts. A few old tools improved their interfaces and schema
support, and some common older practices received new and friendlier faces
which may expose them to more and larger-scaled projects.

XML Spy 3.5

Alexander Falk, President of Altova, demonstrated the benefits of
integrating an XML Schema editor with an XML document editor, using
substitution groups as an interface feature for editing as well as a
convenience for validation. XML Spy is also tightly integrated with the
Windows environment, using the MSXML 3.0 parser and Internet Explorer to
provide quick previews of XML documents tranformed into HTML using XSLT.

Falk noted that XML Spy now offers "syntax highlighting, for text-based
entry, along with an enhanced grid view providing intelligent entry features
like drag and drop, and an integrated table view for repeating
elements."

XML Authority 2.0

Version 2.0 is a substantial revision with extra features in its
presentation and underlying document modeling support. In addition to a new
interface (shown in Figure 2), XML Authority 2.0 supports the latest version of XML Schemas
excepting identity
constraints.

Figure 2 - XML Authority 2.0

Tom Clark, Manger of Technical Services for TIBCO Extensibility, said
that "XML Authority now gives users more control over what they want to see
in the Content Model diagram. Attributes and type info are available, and
can be switched on and off to meet designer preferences." A new properties
and constraints pane gives editors access to fine-grained information about
their types.

Also new in Version 2.0 are extra support for Extensibility's own Schema Adjunct
Framework, along with Oracle's iFS and Software AG's Tamino. XML
Authority continues to support a wide variety of schema types, including
DTDs, XML-Data Reduced, SOX, and export to RELAX.

<xml>Transport and <xsl>Composer

Whitehill Technologies
demonstrated two tools for transforming information into XML and among XML
vocabularies. Both provide developers with user interfaces that simplify
these complex tasks of data processing.

<xml>Transport
combines two approaches to creating XML documents from legacy sources.
Developers can create XML using rules applied to text streams from any
application, and they can also add information to those streams using ADO
database connectors. The <xml>Transport Designer gives developers a
graphical interface for creating fragment rules, making it simple to create
a variety of fragment types, including appended, columnar, and even joined
fragments. These sets of rules are then applied to information using the
<xml>Transport Server, which combines documents and rules to create
XML documents from legacy sources.

<xsl>Composer
provides a WYSIWYG environment for XSLT development, allowing developers to
drag and drop content from XML documents into a browser, identifying HTML
and CSS markup which should be used to represent that content.
<xsl>Composer automatically generates XSLT stylesheets implementing
those choices, avoiding the need for users to manipulate XSLT syntax
directly. (In the current version, there's no support for direct textual
editing.)

Jim Laffoley, VP of Marketing, noted that Whitehill plans to improve both
of these products in the near future, adding XHTML support to
<xml>Transport and more tools for importing and editing XSL files
directly to <xsl>Composer. Both products may also be purchased in an
integrated package, Whitehill Web.